Money, it's drag...
Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:49 am
Chelsea Clinton lives a charmed life, but don't be fooled: secretly, she's not attached to the oodles of money she and her hedge fund manager husband make each year, the former first daughter said in an interview published over the weekend.
Philanthropy is her true passion, Clinton said, and that's why she permanently left Wall Street to join the Clinton Foundation, which she runs with her parents, former first couple Bill and Hillary Clinton.
'I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t,' Clinton told The Telegraph. 'That wasn’t the metric of success I wanted in my life.'
Despite Chelsea's self-proclaimed disinterest in money-making, a report last week surfaced that she was paid $600,000 by NBC last year to do a smattering of reporting
It is not uncommon for well-known anchors to earn multiple millions per year, but Clinton's reported annual salary is high for the frequency of her segments.
By comparison, her salary is higher than both of the last two editors of the New York Times.
The paycheck from her NBC contract has helped Chelsea and her husband Marc Mezvinsky buy a $10.5 million apartment next to New York's Madison Square Park last spring.
Politico said at the time of its report that the 34-year-old, who is expecting her first child later this year, is now on a month-to-month contract that would ease her departure should her mother decide to run for president in 2016.
It later came to light that Clinton was still being paid $50,000 a month by NBC despite the fact that she hasn't been featured since January.
NBC News has aired two stories by Chelsea Clinton so far in 2014, both on education programs targeting the underprivileged that were shown on Nightly News in January.
The news network told the Associated Press that it does expect two completed stories to air soon, however, and two others are in the works.
Thanks to eight years in the White House and lucrative speaking gigs and book deals afterward, Bill and Hillary were able to pay for Chelsea to attend Sidwell Friends private school as a teenager and Stanford and Oxford universities.
After college, Chelsea experimented in management-consulting and dabbled in her now-husband's career field of hedge fund management.
She left Wall Street in 2008 to help out with her mom's presidential campaign, returning briefly after Hillary lost the Democratic Primary, before determining that she would attend Columbia to get her Masters in public health.
She graduated from Columbia in the spring of 2010 and married Mezvinsky that summer.
The high-profile wedding was held at the former home of millionaire businessman John Jacob Astor IV on 50 acres of land overlooking the Hudson River in Rhinebeck, New York. The wedding boasted 500 guests and was said to cost more than $3 million. Her custom-made Vera Wang dress cost approximately $25,000 alone.
Clinton also began working at New York University as the Assistant Vice-Provost for the Global Network that year.
She left NYU in 2011 and took a contract with NBC and a position at the Clinton Foundation, instead.
